How To Live: A Life Of Montaigne

How do you avoid pointless arguments? How do you get over the death of someone you love? How do you balance the need to feel safe against the need to feel free? How do you deal with fanatics? How do you make the most of every moment?

Such questions arise in most people’s lives. They are all versions of a bigger conundrum: How do you live? This subject obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, considered by many to be the first truly modern author.

Living from 1533 to 1592, in a France dominated by bloody and miserable civil war, he maintained as private a life as possible while writing 107 lively, revealing pieces which he called essais, or “tries” – a term he was the first to use in this way. He meant them not as pedantic treatises, but as attempts or experiments upon himself. Here are some of his titles:

By diverse means we arrive at the same end. Our feelings reach out beyond us. Of friendship. Of cannibals. Of the custom of wearing clothes. How we cry and laugh for the same thing. How our mind hinders itself. Of diversion. Of coaches. Of experience.

Montaigne’s essays are free-roaming explorations of his thoughts and experience, filled with anecdotes and personal reflections. More than four hundred years later, his honesty and charm still draw readers to him in search of companionship and wisdom – as well as sheer enjoyment.

How To Live takes an unconventional approach to telling Montaigne’s life, through the questions he asked himself, and the very different ways in which readers have adapted his perspective over the years.